Friction Was Cited In 1943 Blast, As With Iowa

November 16, 1989|By ROBERT BECKER Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Friction, the cause initially considered for the explosions aboard the USS Iowa this year, was also thought by Navy gun experts to be a possible cause of a 1943 explosion aboard the battleship USS Mississippi that killed 42 sailors.

According to the findings from a 1944 investigation by the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, the explosion in turret No. 2 aboard the Mississippi resulted from either the presence of a burning ember left in the barrel "or from friction ... of the powder bags against the moving rammer" that pushed the propellant and projectile into position.

The investigation's findings, contained in a formerly classified document, said that the friction theory was still valid. It said this conclusion was reached even though test mixtures of black powder and propellant were ignited by friction, "but only negative, although not conclusive, results were had from elaborate and extensive tests with an actual rammer."

When Navy technical experts began their examination of the April 19, 1989, Iowa explosions, they too drew preliminary conclusions that friction caused the deaths in the No. 2 turret.

On May 12, 1989, Capt. Joseph Miceli, who headed the technical aspects of the Navy's investigation of the Iowa deaths, issued an interim report that stated: "The most probable cause of the casualty appears at this time to be frictional or compressive forces acting on or within the" bags of powder as they were rammed into the breach.

When the Iowa investigation was completed and released on Sept. 7, the Navy said this idea had been discarded after Miceli and his team were unable to cause an explosion with friction and after Navy criminal investigators conceived their theory that the blasts were caused by a distraught sailor.

Navy officials said this week the report on the Mississippi was authentic, but pointed out that it was later overruled by higher-ranking investigators. They also repeated assurances that friction or other accidental means did not cause the Iowa deaths.

Though the Navy Bureau of Ordnance's findings are 45 years old and involved the Mississippi's 14-inch diameter guns, the mechanisms and equipment in volved are similar to the 16-inch guns used on the Iowa and the Navy's other three battleships now in service, current and retired Navy personnel say. The Iowa was commissioned in 1943.

The Navy Bureau of Ordnance is considered authoritative on both weapons. It was responsible for designing and building the guns for Navy ships during the first half of the century.

"They were the real gun experts," said retired Rear Adm. Gene LaRocque, a former battleship captain and the founder of the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "They knew more about guns than everybody else in the Navy put together."

At the time of the 1943 explosion, the Mississippi, a New Mexico-class battleship built at Newport News Shipbuilding and commissioned in 1917, was shelling Makin Island in the Pacific.

Lt. Bruce Coles, a spokesman for the Navy, this week discounted the similarities between the accidents aboard the Iowa and the Mississippi.

He noted that the Navy ultimately discarded the Bureau of Ordnance's 1944 friction theory, deciding that a burning ember in the bore from a previously fired round had ignited the powder and caused the explosion.

"That couldn't have been the case on Iowa," Coles said. "The gun where the explosion occurred had not fired" that day.

He said the final technical report on the Iowa explosions had been released to Congress; a congressional source said it concluded that gunner's mate Clayton Hartwig, who died in the blasts, put a bomb made of chemicals into the breech and the bomb exploded and ignited the powder and propellant when compressed by the rammer.

Navy officials say technical experts conducted more than 20,000 tests on bags of powder taken from the Iowa last spring, including attempts to create an explosion through friction.

In these tests, Navy technicians simulated conditions in the center gun at the time of the accident, including ramming the 110-pound bags of powder 21-inches further into the barrel than normal. Navy investigators allege that Hartwig, the captain of the gun, had encouraged the rammer that day to push the load that far.

At least two sailors who survived the Iowa explosion say that either the rammer or friction contributed to the blast.

Gunners mate Kendall L. Truitt, one of the 12 sailors who escaped the No. 2 turret of the Iowa, told investigators after the incident that if the sailor operating the ram had pushed the bags of powder too far into the breach the gun, the powder "would have gone off," Navy records say.

Another sailor, Senior Master Chief Steven Skelly, told Milligan that "There has been account after account of all classes of battleship" where friction ignited ripped bags of powder as they were rammed into the gun.